


it's much too late to talk the knife out of their hands

by Plooby



Series: and as we fall we sing [1]
Category: Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: F/M, Jady Brosca, if your big sister accuses you of being in love with a boy you MUST deny it, imagination adventures about dragon age ocs, it's the law
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-16
Updated: 2020-06-16
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:00:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24758182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Plooby/pseuds/Plooby
Summary: Jady Brosca gets a chance to catch up with her sister, and has to deal with what comes next.
Relationships: Alistair/Female Brosca (Dragon Age)
Series: and as we fall we sing [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1790470
Comments: 7
Kudos: 10





	it's much too late to talk the knife out of their hands

"So," Rica said, drawing the word out with pure sweet innocence. " _Alistair._ "

Jady sighed and rolled her eyes, in spite of looking at nothing but the ceiling. She should've known it was coming eventually. "Aye, that's his name. What about it?"

She lay sprawled on her back on Rica's absurd, vast bed in her private wing of the palace, canopied with glowing stone and silks and surrounded by every manner of pretty thing. Rica lay on her belly beside her, hands propped under her chin, just like they'd lain a thousand times on their much narrower shared cot in their much dingier corner of the crumbling Dust Town rowhouse, back some probably six lifetimes ago. If Jady closed her eyes, though, she could almost imagine they were still back there: grubbing candle-ends out of merchants' gutters when they weren't looking to bring back for light and warmth, Rica sitting every day at the edge of where they were allowed in the city with a sweet smile like armor, trying to coax coins into her alms-cup. Mother's drunken snoring from the other side of the room certainly helped the illusion, although it was further away than it had ever been able to be in those days.

But it _was_ an illusion. That world, that life, was gone, and for both of them now. Not that it wasn't good riddance to bad rubbish.

"He's handsome for a human, isn't he?" Rica went on, still with that airy impression of being casual. "And so tall."

Jady shrugged. "Actually, he's about middling, as they go." That made Rica push up a little higher and crane around into Jady's sight-line, her eyes wide.

"Ancestors! Really?" Jady nodded, smirking, and Rica sat up with her legs tucked under her on the mattress, smoothing her fine jeweled skirts with a fastidious hand. It was a bit sad and a bit relieving to see how carefully she still treated all that finery she wore. "Well, you should tell me all about how tall humans are now, except you shouldn't, because you're changing the subject."

That won a groan out of Jady, and she slung a forearm across her eyes. "I don't know what you want! He's Alistair. All right? I told you, he's a Warden, like me. He's the first one I met when the one who came here brought me back, and he's helped me out a lot because everything went tits-up and I never got to find out what I'm supposed to be sodding doing. That's it, that's the whole story. Happy?"

"If that's the whole story, I'm a nug's arse end," Rica said, with another sweet cheerful smile. The amusement value of her talking like that while dolled up in a queen's weight of fancy only lasted a second, though, and then Jady was shifting on the bed, dodging her eyes away.

"What, you want to know if I'm bedding him? Course I am. What do I look like, an idiot?"

Rica shook her head, looking patient. "I've seen you with boys you were going to bed with plenty of times before, Leske not least among them. You never acted like that around any of them."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Jady said, with all available dignity. It was Rica's turn to sigh now.

"Well, tell me about him, at least. I wish I'd had more of a chance to talk to your friends before they all had to run off for provisions."

Never mind that they hadn't actually had to do anything; Jady had practically chased them off on made-up errands, before agreeing to come back with Rica to coo over her little nephew and catch up a while in the palace's depths. It was enough to feel their eyes on her from behind when a guardsman spat _brand_ at her under his breath, but for Wynne to come back here and hear Mother hurl curses at her youngest daughter in a cloud of ale fumes? For Leliana to take in what she'd immediately recognize as the crib of a favorite concubine? She wasn't _ashamed_ of them, exactly, she'd never be that, but...

"He's all right," Jady said, awkwardly, and then when it fell like lead to the floor she gathered her breath and rolled over on her side, to face Rica, arm pillowing her head. "He's an idiot. He thinks he's a lot funnier than he is. He definitely thinks his hair looks better than it does and he could stand to wash more, and he's just... _good_. Decent, like. Like the old Paragon heroes in the stupid baby stories you used to tell me." Rica's eyebrows were beginning to rise, and Jady looked firmly away from them, down at a bit of the fine blanket she was plucking at between her fingers. "His father's a king, right? It's true, even if you'd never know it. I mean, it doesn't make him a prince, the old man just cracked some palace maid's hogshead and humans are funny about how that works, his mother'd have to have been the queen too for him to count. But that's not why you wouldn't know it, it's... he doesn't think it matters. Any of it. He doesn't even _want_ to be a prince, or a king, he wants to be a Grey Warden. He did all along, to -- be a big hero, and help people. That's what he's like. He does all these things just because he thinks they're right, and he makes the stupidest jokes while he's doing it, and he's so sweet to me all the time because he's so daft he thinks I'm good, too."

She was still looking at her hand lying on the counterpane when Rica's smaller, slimmer fingers - crusted with rings, these days - slipped in to twine with her own thick callused ones. "Well, good," Rica said, and Jady glanced up to find her hunkered down closer on the bed now too, smiling with a tenderness that was hard to look at. "Because anything less and I'd have to give him a solid kick in the arse, and I'm not sure these fancy shoes are up to it, with all that armor on him." It startled Jady into a snort of laughter, and Rica flopped down next to her, eye to eye, still holding her hand. "...You _love_ him."

"I what?" Jady reared up a litlte higher on her own elbow, making a face. "No I don't. Don't be stupid."

"I'm not, and you do so." Rica regarded her with every half-forgotten inch of a big sister's insufferable smugness. "You should see your face, talking about him. I never thought I'd see the day my baby sister would fall for anyone, let alone some overgrown human, but you've gone and done it, haven't you?" Jady spluttered, incoherent with indignation, and Rica rolled over onto her back on the bed, laughing. "Jady! Stop! I'm being happy for you! He sounds wonderful, and if anyone deserves someone like that, it's you." When Jady still couldn't summon any answer for that after a moment's pause, though, Rica turned her head to look over at her, her expression settled back to being sober and sweetly fond. "I'm so proud of you, you know. To bursting, ever since I saw you back. My little Jady, a real hero, out saving the surface with the Wardens. I always knew..." She paused, turning her eyes to some thoughtful distance. "I always knew you were special, you deserved better than all this. I mean -- everyone in Dust Town does, honestly, but you especially. Now everyone else can see it too, and I'm so happy. I'm so glad this Alistair boy can, too."

Jady was now staring fixedly out at the stone walls and nowhere near her sister. Not able to even begin to meet Rica's eyes, or take any of that in past her own skin. There was what felt like something hard and heavy and poisoned coiling up in the bottom of her chest: a fixed, too-big lump, dripping itself down her stomach and making it sick.

"Ugh, fine, stop it, you're so embarrassing," she grumbled, when she could find the breath past that weight to play it off, and now sat up herself with her legs folded under her. "It's your turn, anyway."

"My turn?" Rica laughed through her surprise, and Jady nodded, still trying for casual.

"What about _your_ sort-of-prince, then? You sneak, you just said you caught a noble, you never said it was a king's son."

"I wasn't sure _what_ I could say, at first," Rica protested, although her laugh fell a bit flat on what went unsaid between them: that soon after, she hadn't been able to say anything at all, anyway. "Bhelen is... wonderful, really. Better than someone like me has any right to expect. He's very good to me, and such a good father to little Endrin. He's even kind to Mother, and she at least has the sense not to be awful to him back."

Jady chewed her lip, and then felt a strange ache of surprise when she realized Rica wasn't scolding her for it. It had always been a bad habit of hers, and Rica had hated it, and probably rightly so; the lip rouge she'd started stealing out of Rica's meager drawer of possessions when she was barely a teenager couldn't be made of healthy stuff, after all. But apparently they were past such things now, as a Grey Warden and her sister. Strange to think. "Have you heard what they say about him?" she asked, hesitatingly, after a moment. Still sounding as neutral as she could. "You know, what... they say he did."

Rica seemed to hesitate herself... and then did her smile seem a bit practiced, more the product of all her careful training than truth? Surely not. "I'm certain I've heard everything," she said, just as light as before. "People say all kinds of things about someone in his position. I don't think you can pay any of it much mind."

And what if Jady's smile back at that was definitely much more reflex than fact? "Probably. Never knew from down in the dust how much they sodding _gossip_ up here. I figure the only way anybody has time to smith or fight is because those just use your hands, and leave your mouth free." Rica laughed, more honestly now, though Jady's own smile still felt pasted on her lips. "But he's... all right to you? He treats you well? Does right by you and the little one?"

"He's never been anything but perfectly sweet to me or Endrin," Rica agreed, and the real, unpracticed warmth in her smile finally made a few parts of that lump in Jady's chest loosen up a bit -- even as it ratcheted a few others up tighter. "I'm very happy, I promise. Things have been so good for us, and Bhelen is the whole reason why. You should spend some more time with him while you're here, Jady -- I'm sure you'd like him too, if you just got to know him a bit more."

And Jady swallowed down on the lump hard, and made her mouth into that big smile one more time,, the best one she could manage. "Aye," she said, and tried for all she was worth not to let it sound like she was forcing it out, through a tiny narrow passage that was all she had left to breathe through. "I expect we'll find our way to getting along."

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the song "The Latest Toughs" by Okkervil River.
> 
> (It doesn't really come up, but as a point of interest, Jady Brosca is the Hero of Ferelden in the continuity of [Bloody Down Both Sides](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21665272/chapters/51666385).)


End file.
